Re: Redesigh of the VC front end

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> 2. Otherwise, if you are in a vc dired buffer, and
> include-files-not-directories is non-nil, and no fileset is selected,
> select all files at and below directory level.

This is bad.  It should simply return the "file or directory under
point".

> 2. When the backend supports the concept, every vc-dir buffer has a
> special top-line entry that can be marked to select the entire repo.

In PCL-CVS we list subdirectories, including ".", which is hence not
particularly special.  But maybe there's a difference between "." and
"the entire repo".

> So the Dired code has to go, once the vc-dir code is at functional
> parity to it.  This will take a little more work.

In many respects the vc-dir code will never be at parity with vc-dired,
unless we make a special effort to merge it again with dired.  I.e. we
shouldn't forget that some people liked to do dired operations from
vc-dired.

For what it's worth, I don't think that merging the two is necessarily
a bad idea.  But it seems terribly difficult to be able to do such
a combined mode that's both as good as dired and as good as vc-dir.

> that's what the user selected.  This means that file-oriented back ends
> (SCCS, RCS, CVS) will have to do directory expansion for themselves
> when it is needed.

Actually, CVS handles directories just fine in most respects.

> There is also a bit of murk around the handling of unregistered files.
> I haven't completely thought that one out yet.  I think the code can be
> rewritten so that filesets of unregistered files are simply passed to
> the back end, yielding the VCS's own error for this case when the user
> did not select 'register' as the operation.

100% agreement, especially because there may be good reasons for the
user to do that (e.g. if Emacs's notion of registration is buggy, or
out-of-date, or because the backend includes special semantics for them
(e.g. its "commit" operation may automatically add the unregistered
files mentioned on the command line).


        Stefan